Finally, a post about Egypt (and Israel): A photo essay

One of my favorite activities on a recent visit to my parents was going through my parents' and grandparents' old photo albums. I loved seeing the way certain themes echo through family photos: there's the "Kids Playing Piano" pictures, the "Kids Held Upside-down by Adult" pictures, the "Kids Reading" pictures. First of my father and his brother, then of me and my sister (weren't we cute?), and if you're reading this from facebook you've seen the same pictures of my nieces and nephews.

Then I got to the photo album Grandma Kack put together with pictures of the trip she and Granddaddy Joe took to Israel and Egypt, 25 years ago. There was the echo again, resounding in the pictures I took on a trip with my friend Sarah, in October 2010.

The pictures of Israel looked somewhat different from mine; I think the Old City in Jerusalem has had a little work done since the mid-eighties.

This view of the Mount of Olives from 2010 is much tidier
than the same view in Grandma's 1980's picture.
This archeological-site-that-looks-like-a-garden
looked like an archeological site 25 years ago.

Grandma took a picture of this view of the Garden of Gethsemane, too.
The olive trees, reputed to be 2,000 years old, had grown slightly between

the time she took hers and the time I took this one. Other than that--identical.

Grandma--who was there with her church, after all--
was way too polite to take a picture inside
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
where I snapped this photo of Golgotha while waiting in line.

I didn't go down into the chapel of the Sepulchre itself,
and this crowd they're calling a queue outside the door is why.

But Grandma's pictures of Egypt... those you could mix up in the photos Gino and I took and have a hard time telling which was which. The buildings look the same; the people are dressed the same. The major difference would be that the cars that were old when we saw them, were new then, and the buildings had fallen into twenty-five years' worth of disrepair.

Here we all are in Cairo!

I should have taken a picture of the traffic. Everyone who goes to Cairo talks about the traffic. Several of the pictures in Grandma's album are of the traffic, with labels such as "view of Cairo traffic from the bus" or "more traffic". (I'd show you one of Grandma's pictures--like I said, it looks pretty much exactly the same now as it did then--except that I foolishly didn't force the album into my suitcase when I left. I think Mom's sent it on to my cousin Carrie, the family archivist.) The Lonely Planet notes that "the crowds on a Cairo footpath make Manhattan look like a ghost town," and that's even more true of the roadways. I don't remember seeing a working traffic light the entire time I was there: the cars communicate with each other using a local language of honks and blinking lights, and pedestrians who want to cross the street just... go for it, through breaks in the traffic that wouldn't look like breaks in New York or London.

I don't think Gino intended this to be a picture of traffic,
but it gives you the idea.
Note especially the pedestrians nonchalantly wandering through it.

In fact, looking over my albums now, I realize now that I mostly took a lot of pictures of Important Famous Sights on this trip. Which is great, but it means I don't have pictures of the sights that actually made the biggest impressions on me. I could kick myself for not getting a picture of the cart selling live rabbits and chickens outside the Street of Tentmakers (though if you've watched the Pyramids episode of An Idiot Abroad--and if you haven't, you should, it's on Sky in the UK and the Science Channel in the US--you'll see Karl Pilkington remark on it, too). Thanks to a Cairo-based friend of Gino's, we had a private driver for our trip out to the pyramids, and as we drove through heavily-urban Giza we saw as many herds of sheep and goats as I usually see on a train ride through the English countryside. I didn't get pictures of that, either.

Gino took this picture of the Street of Tentmakers--mine came out blurry.

However, the poverty of Cairo is going to show up in your pictures no matter what else you were trying to capture. There's basically no view of the city that doesn't include crumbling buildings, glassless windows, twenty-year-old cars.

Actually, I guess that's not entirely true.
This view, from the balcony of the our hotel in Zamalek,
show a perfectly well-developed if slightly smoggy modern city.

This photo of the Citadel--which Gino took from the medieval Bab Zuweila--
gives a more close-up view of downtown Cairo,

as does this one, which I took from the same spot,
looking in the other direction.

We visited quite a few mosques while we were in Cairo, and I loved every one of them. I wrote in my journal while I was there that "just existing takes all my concentration." Everywhere we went there was something to watch out for: oncoming cars; aggressive vendors; friendly children. I was never more aware of the city's chaos than when I took off my shoes, entered the sky-roofed, gently-patterned square, and felt so much of the responsibility to pay attention slip away.

Al-Hakim Mosque. Ahhhhhhh.
The irony is, one of the most peaceful places I experienced in Cairo
is named after a despot whose rule was marked by his very creative
methods of torturing his enemies.

The Turkish-style Mosque of Mohammed Ali,
at the Citadel.

While Sarah was staying with expat friends Valentine and Eric in Maadi and being admirably Cairene, Gino and I had more of a touristy experience. We used the massive number of points Gino had built up during his business travel last year to stay for free at the Cairo Marriott, where, as you can guess from the picture of the pool, we did not want for comfort. (Sarah stayed with me there the night before Gino arrived, and our first morning in Cairo was the most luxurious of our trip, involving breakfast in deck chairs next to the pool before the day got seriously hot.) The Cairo Marriott is sort of Cairo-lite: they have a restaurant serving exceptionally tasty Egyptian food, but they have something like eleven other restaurants serving everything from standard Italian to "Midwestern Cuisine." They also have a shopping arcade with tiny branches of most of the stores mentioned in the Lonely Planet, including a bookstore whose main branch is right around the corner from the hotel, anyway.

Our little westernized oasis.

But, as Valentine pointed out, Westerners rarely visit Cairo as independent tourists: most of the other guests in our hotel were there the way my grandparents were, as part of tour groups: with an inclusive breakfast and a coach waiting to pick them up for the day's adventures every morning. They probably didn't spend a lot of time wandering the neighborhood of the hotel. Even in ritzy Zamalek, as soon as you step beyond the security gates of your hotel, you are no longer in tourist-land but have ventured into actual Cairo, with the insane traffic and the crowded, narrow sidewalks and the general sensory overload.

I am not, by the way, knocking the tour-group method of travel. Cairo is huge and busy and not built for tourists. Cab drivers don't necessarily speak English, have meters in their cabs, or carry change. Violent crime is low, but scams and cons are such a significant part of the local economy that they rate mentions in every section (Shopping, Eating, Sleeping) of the Lonely Planet. Everywhere you go, people want to talk to you, to sell you something, to show you a special, secret feature of the monument you're visiting (in exchange for a tip, of course). It is beyond overwhelming. We were accompanied by friends who spoke Arabic and had lived in Cairo for a few years, which kept the stress level bearable--I honestly can't imagine visiting without some sort of guide smoothing things out.

Gino's and my big tourist adventure was to take the Marriott's dinner cruise down the Nile, because I had taken six weeks' worth of belly dancing classes at my gym, and I wanted to see a real belly dancer do it.

The real belly dancer.
You can see her in An Idiot Abroad, too.

The one thing I knew I wanted to do on the trip to Egypt was ride a camel around the Pyramids. I'd read the section of the guidebook that said riding a camel was a good idea, told me where to rent camels, and how much to pay. I thought I was all set. Then, on our last day in Cairo, we actually got there.

These people would like to give you a camel ride.
Or sell you a set of postcards.
Or give you a headscarf.
Or take your picture with the Pyramids.
Or let you take their picture with the Pyramids.
Or take a picture of you riding on their camel, in front of the Pyramids.

Sarah, Gino, and I went more-or-less on our own: we hired a driver who was recommended by a friend of Gino's, but the driver spoke no English. (The Sphinx is not called the Sphinx by Egyptians. We thought we could pronounce Abu al-Hol well enough to make ourselves understood by an Arabic speaker. We were wrong. We got Ahmed to take us to see it by pointing to the picture on the guidebook.)

The Lonely Planet section on the Pyramids includes an entire sub-heading titled "The Hassle." It reminds you that "the Pyramids have been attracting tourists since they were built, and a local was probably there offering them a ride on a donkey"--which I actually found helpful to remind myself when we got inside the complex and the young men fell on us with their postcards, their scarab beads, their headscarves, their models of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. The constant attention, the constant negotiations, made it really hard to concentrate on the archeological Wonder of the World right next to us. It made negotiating for a camel ride around that wonder too intimidating to even attempt.

One of the Seven Wonders of the World.
I think Grandma got a shot like this too, come to think of it.
Gino took this one, as I managed to break my camera before we got this far.

Gino also took this picture of the Sphinx,
or Abu al-Hol ("Father of Terror," according to Lonely Planet)

On the way back to our hotel, Ahmed demonstrated the very best style of Egyptian driving by pulling up alongside a vegetable truck. The men inside greeted him warmly and handed him a cucumber with one end cut off, which he offered to Gino, Sarah, and I--a nice change from the sticky, too-sweet Cokes that had been all we could find at the Pyramids. We had time for lunch and another luxurious swim in our oasis of a pool before Sarah and I took the hotel car to the train station for the night train down to Luxor, and the next part of our adventure.

(Of which, sadly, I have no pictures, on account of my camera getting broken at the Pyramids. Oh, well.)

When Sarah e-mailed me back in August to ask if I wanted to go to Cairo, and maybe Luxor, and possibly Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with her, I gave it about twenty-four hours' thought and said, "that sounds like pretty much the definition of a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and of course I'm coming." At the time, we had no idea how once-in-a-lifetime it was, but we're both extremely pleased to have made the journey before the Modern History sections of our guidebooks went completely out of date. Our friends in Cairo are fine--you can read Eric's account of pre- and post-revolutionary Cairo here--and excited about the future.

Me, I'm just excited to go back someday.

Next time I am totally riding a camel.

My own personal NoWriYe

It took going away for a month and then coming back and re-reading, but my last post made me notice something:

I spent beaucoup (that's pronounced "boo-coo," with both syllables stressed equally) bucks and two years on a master's degree, and in the last six months I've dropped most of the good habits that program helped me form.

Years ago, I wrote a lengthy Longstockings post full of advice to beginning writers: to write, if not every day, at least more days than not; to find a community of writers; to read extensively, both the kinds of books you want to write and books about the craft of writing. So why wasn't I following any of my own advice? Why was I disregarding so much of what I'd worked so hard and paid so much to learn?

Fortunately, I am old enough to know that the secret to life is not never getting blown off-course--it's getting back on course once you realize you're lost. And fortunately part ii, my personal revelation came at New Year's Resolution time, when the young (ok, middle-aged) writer's thoughts turn to renewed determination and better work habits.

I checked off my first completed resolution on 3 January, when I joined the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. I'd been a member in New York, but let my membership lapse when I moved to London. Fortunately, it turns out they have a British Isles chapter. I'm now a member, and have joined the "11+ Realistic" online critique group (second resolution crossed off!). I'm also looking forward to attending masterclasses and events in their professional series, and meeting some fellow kidlit folks in person.

I have also, over the past few weeks, built a kid/teen TBR pile that is threatening to take over my living room.

All that remains is the part that is most firmly in my power: I have to get my butt in front of my manuscript, as often as possible.

So far, I've managed that in a paradoxical way. I used to tell myself, "you need to write 1,000/1,500/2,000 words the next time you sit down at your MS." A lot of weeks, this meant that I had maybe one good writing day a week, and six days of avoiding writing.

In 2011 I've managed to just tell myself, "you need to write something in your manuscript today." One day it was 30 words. At another time have such a poor showing would have made me wonder, "why did I even bother opening Scrivener?"

But you know what? My excitement level about my WIP has skyrocketed this week. I've found myself jotting down ideas at all sorts of odd times, like out on a date with my husband. I've solved--or at least ameliorated--a couple of significant problems with the manuscript. I'm living with my WIP these days, where for the past few months I've just been working on it.

This is the start of my Novel Writing Year. If my habits improve the way I hope they will, I'll write more than one novel before 2012. Probably not two, but at least one-and-a-bit.

Who else is rededicating yourselves to your art for the new year? What resolutions are you following to make that happen?

Why I ignored NaNoWriMo

I've never really felt the need to sign up for National Novel Writing Month. It first came to my attention in grad school, and back in my weekly workshop days it wasn't like I was hurting for motivation to get writing. When I graduated, I was part of a community of writers, and it was second nature to sit down and pound away at my WIP for a couple of hours per day. That's pretty much been the case every November since: I've never felt the need to sign up for NaNoWriMo because National Novel Writing Month has looked like... any other month in my life.

This year is different. Maybe it's that I've lived in London long enough to make the motivation of my literary New York social life seem very far away; maybe it's that my volunteer work is starting to seriously pick up. Maybe it's fear of rejection--or, as my therapist theorized for years, fear of success. (One of those two things has to happen to my WIP once I finish it, after all.) Maybe it's just the year I've had, which, without getting more personal than I'm willing to be on a public blog, has involved a lot of non-writing-related bad news.

In any case, with one thing and another, this past month I could have used the motivation of announcing myself as part of a community of people all typing away.

I just have one issue, though, and unfortunately, it's a doozy. I disagree with the entire premise of NaNoWriMo. I don't agree that the best way to write a novel is to keep your fingers moving across your keyboard until you've filled up about 175 pages--50,000 words--or that a first-time novelist needs to start by racking up as great a wordcount as possible. The website makes no claims that a quality work of art will result from this exercise; this is all about getting the "shitty first draft" (thank you, Anne Lamott) down on paper, in a very limited time period.

I know writers who work this way. I know published writers of great books who work this way. For that kind of writer, NaNoWriMo is a great boon.

I cannot work this way (and I know published writers of great books who can't, either).

Oh, I can do a shitty first draft of a scene, maybe even a chapter. That was the first skill I picked up in grad school. But a whole novel? I tried it with my last MS, and all that happened was an anxiety attack and several weeks of writer's block. I couldn't move forward with the manuscript when I had fifty pages I was seriously unhappy with. As fifty pages turned into sixty, writing that novel lost all the joy of creating something new, and felt more and more like walking through a huge airport carrying increasingly heavy luggage. When I finally gave up and went back and fixed what I knew was wrong, thereby giving myself permission to keep doing that as needed, the rest of the book was a lot more fun to write.

NaNoWriMo's website makes clear that they expect the people participating to be beginners: one of the FAQ's is, "If I'm just writing 50,000 words of crap, why bother? Why not just write a real novel later, when I have more time?" And the answer has a lot I agree with: giving yourself permission to make mistakes; giving yourself a reason to just start already, without any "once the kids are in school"/"once my workload lightens up"/"once I'm retired" procrastination. I'm all for encouraging would-be novelists to get started, and for reassuring them that the first sentences out of their keyboards will not live up to their expectations, and that's okay.

But I wonder how many beginning writers end up discouraged with their efforts and feeling like they'll never write a novel, when really, the NaNoWriMo format just isn't for them. As far as I can tell, NaNoWriMo's website doesn't offer any advice for what to do after you've written your shitty first draft. It doesn't refer its participants to any books on the craft of writing. It does have a list of published NaNoWriMo authors, but no articles from any of them about the amazing amount of work that must have come between the month of writing 50,000 words and the publication date.

I want some kind of NaNoWriMo for the slow writer. Maybe NaNoWriYe. The website would say, "Some days it's about hitting your word count. Some days it's about fixing what's wrong, or outlining the next bit you're going to write, or re-vamping the whole project to make room for the brilliant idea you had as you were falling asleep that totally fixes that huge hole in your plot." Participants would still spend a couple hours a day at their work, and would still write together, for those for whom that's helpful. We'd take time out to review what we'd written and brainstorm solutions to any issues we were having, and tell each other when it was time to stop fiddling with that one scene and write the next bit, on an as-needed basis. We'd all focus on doing whatever it took to produce good work, not just to write 175 pages of whatever. We'd work under the impression that writing is an everyday activity, not a once-a-year blast.

Oh, crap. I just figured out what seems so familiar about that scenario: it was grad school.

Anyone know of a UK-based PhD in Writing for Children?

On deciding to just be this size

When I was thirteen or fourteen, Seventeen magazine ran a diet article. Half of the article was, "How to eat if you're too skinny" (you got to have milkshakes every day!); the other half, "How to eat if you're too fat" (oh, who remembers; it was the late 80s, so I'm sure it involved lots of celery). So I asked my mom, "am I too skinny or too fat?" I hoped she'd say I was too skinny, so I could have the milkshakes. But I suspected I was too fat, and doomed to celery.

Imagine my surprise--and incredulity--when she said, "I think you're just the right size." This was an option for which Seventeen had simply not prepared me. I was sure she was just being nice: it couldn't possibly be that I honestly didn't need to lose weight.

I have had maybe two years in my adult life where I was free from that feeling. In my late 20s, I did several months' worth of Weight Watchers, and reached the lowest weight I'd ever been as an adult. I could wear all kinds of clothes I'd never felt comfortable in before: miniskirts! sleeveless tops! shirts tucked in!! I got cold much more easily, and couldn't hold my whiskey nearly as well, but who cared? For the first time in my life, I was taking jeans I thought would fit into dressing rooms, and then having to ask for a smaller size! I was THIN! I had mastered life!

Of course, life went on. I got a boyfriend, and instead of living on Weight Watchers meals at home, I was going out for dinner a lot--and not always ordering a salad, and sometimes sharing a starter. I started going to grad school in addition to working full-time, which cut down on gym-going time as it upped whiskey-drinking time. I got married and started cooking more; I moved to a country with amazing, calorific treats like steak-and-ale pie and chicken tikka masala and sticky toffee pudding. I ate real ice cream again, and realized that Skinny Cow just didn't cut it.

So for the past few years, I've been back to that old feeling, that I should really lose ten pounds. Except now it's compounded with guilt that I gained them to begin with. I have failed in my responsibility--to my husband, to myself, to the legions of people who have to look at me every day as I go about my business--to be the thin person I've proven I can be.

Because that's what women are supposed to do, right? Because otherwise we're "letting ourselves go," and it's our own fault if our partner leaves or we lose out on a promotion or we get sick with something chronic.

I finally started to snap out of this a couple of months or so ago, when I pulled on a pair of old khakis that I wear around the house. I had the traditional self-flagellation moment as I buttoned them, because they fit around my waist, and not around my hips the way they did a few years ago. And then I had a laughing moment at the very mid-90s styling of this particular pair of trousers, which are designed to fit at, not below, the waist and which feature billowing pleats in the front and taper to an end just at the ankle. And then I thought, holy shit, I'm 35 and I can still wear trousers I bought when I was 21.

Maybe--just maybe--the smallest I've ever been isn't the size I'm meant to be, as an adult. Maybe I'm actually supposed to be the size I've been for most of my adult life.

It was the start of a serious think.

That think--fueled by lots of reading, to which I'll link down below, rather than try to cleverly fit it all in the body of the post--continued right into the belly-dancing class at my gym, and learning how to shimmy correctly (hint: it's not about the boobs), and a second sudden flash of insight:

The only thing my skinny body could do that my heavier body can't, is wear smaller clothes.

That body wasn't a better dancer.
It wasn't a better writer.
It wasn't a more creative teacher.
It didn't sing any more beautifully.
It couldn't walk any farther.
It wasn't a more effective leader.
It wasn't any better at picking up new skills (like belly-dancing, or golf).

Even if I were to someday put on those mid-90s khakis and find they wouldn't button, all that would mean was that I had outgrown a pair of pants. It wouldn't take anything away from who I am and what I can do.

So, now I have to learn a whole new way of thinking. I try not to step on the scale, because sometimes I do that and the number makes me feel bad, even though all my clothes still fit and I'm dripping with sweat and high on endorphins from my workout. I'm trying to start to think about my food and activity choices in terms of "what will help me stay healthy?" rather than "what will help me fit back into my smallest LBD?" And I have to make myself remember: I hadn't mastered life when I lost weight. I had just fixed one thing that had been bugging me.

Most of all, I've had to give up on what Kate Harding calls The Fantasy of Being Thin (oh, look, there's a link after all). I have to keep pounding the message into my own brain: there is nothing I want to do that requires being thin. After all (another link, coming up!), Jennifer Hudson won an Oscar and a Grammy before she lost weight.

And you know what? Losing weight was time and effort-consuming. I love my life, but I haven't exactly achieved everything I want to in it. Why would I want to distract myself from the goals that matter to me, by directing energy towards a goal that won't help me achieve them?

Further Reading:
More on the Jennifer Hudson Weight Watchers Ad
Shapely Prose FAQ
The problem with modern diet advice
More problems with modern diet advice
You Don't Have to be Pretty
Already Pretty Reality Check

Budding

On the last day of my recent stay with my sister and her family, Liz brought out a huge plastic bin full of my parents' correspondence with my grandparents. The letters went from the late 1960s through the mid-nineties (when everyone got AOL). I had a great time learning about my parents' lives in college and grad school, and as very young parents, from their own hands.

(Honestly, it kind of made me worry about how much family history is being lost to e-mail and facebook. But then, all this family history would have been lost to the desire for less clutter, in a family with less tolerance for clutter than mine has.)

One envelope was postmarked from Salina, KS in 1981, and addressed from "Kathryne Alfred" to "Grandma Barten." Inside were a couple of brightly-colored pictures, and a sheet of ruled looseleaf in my mother's handwriting, but a writing style very different from my mother's. (An explanatory note at the bottom says, "pictures by Kathryne; Story written by Carol as Kathryne told it.")

I'm still giggling over this. Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, I give you--complete with illustration--my first ever YA story!!

Once a little girl met a little boy. One night when the little girl was 18 and the little boy was 19 the little girl said, "Let's kiss!" and the little boy said, "Tomorrow ask your mother and father if we can get married." Then the next morning they got married and lived in the apartment house and lived with their mother and father. And then they lived happily ever after. The end.

Of course I'm biased, but I see potential here.

More Kindled Thoughts

I started out to simply post this on facebook with a pithy comment. Then my pithy comment grew out of pithy-length and into blog-post-length, and I suddenly remembered: hey! I have a blog!

Hi, Gang. It's been a busy summer. Places to go, sisters to entertain (and be entertained by), old friends to rescue from airline cancellations. Junior League action plans to write. Novel drafts to finish. New books to read, for that matter. You understand.

Anyway, speaking of all the books I've read this summer: back to the NYTimes' panic over "E-books top hardcovers at Amazon", and why this is a non-story.

In the first place, is the NYTimes sure that this number represents people who typically read hardcover books switching over to read them on Kindle? Because I have a counter-data set of one: I have a longstanding policy--way predating the Kindle--of not buying hardcover books by authors I don't know personally. I just don't have any more room to store them.

The Kindle actually means I read a lot more new releases, because in the old days I would have waited for the paperback or for the book to show up at the library. I still do that with hardcovers that aren't available on Kindle, so there's no need to clutch your pearls over the fact that e-book sales overtook sales of "hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition."

In the second place, the data here is completely skewed, for a whole lot of reasons. Amazon is the only seller of Kindle books, but not the only seller of hardcovers. One of the huge advantages of the Kindle is instant gratification: I order, I read. Amazon can't offer that with paper books, but the Daunt where I kill time on the way to my volunteer gig can. Hardcover is not the only print book format, and I'd wager (I should be a good blogger and look this up, but I'm not going to) it's not even the most popular: the hardcover sections of most bookstores are dwarfed by paperbacks. So measuring e-book sales against hardcover sales, even if you could enlarge your vision from Amazon and look industry-wide (and why can't you, if you've got the resources of the New York Times behind you?), is a bit of a straw man argument.

Look, I love paper books as much as the next bookworm. Here's a picture of part of one wall in my flat--it goes on, there's another bookcase on the opposite wall, and the guest room/study is similarly lined. I love my paper books. I'm a great re-reader, as well, and I love the way the feel and smell of a particular book can conjure up my life at the time that I first read it. I do want to own paper copies of some books: I have a whole shelf of autographed copies of my friends' books, and that simply wouldn't work on Kindle.

But I don't get the "oh noes, electronics are coming to steal your paper!" panic. The invention of recording didn't doom live music performance. Theatre survives alongside film; I own three radios and only one television. Publishers are still turning out hardcover books, 80 years after the invention of cheaper, easier-to-carry paperbacks.

(Okay, so the internet is killing newspapers. Fair enough. But book publishers have been smart enough not to equate "digital" with "free" in readers' minds, and have dodged that bullet. And I'll admit: I miss cassette tapes, because I don't have a way to listen to my mix tapes from high school anymore.)

I would love someone better at research than I am do write an article about how e-books are changing reading habits. Are the numbers of people who tell Pew or the NEA that they've read a novel in the past year changing? Are sales of non-fiction going up or down among different formats? Are people paying for newspaper and magazine subscriptions again, to use on their e-readers? Are total sales of all reading material, in all formats, up or down?

I'm just annoyed at the idea that the New York Times will use front-page real estate on the staggering news that people are consuming books in the same format they consume everything else these days.

Paris, je t'aime

I have always had a tense relationship with Paris. I grew up with my dad's amazing stories about the Summer of '69, when he was a student there and he and his group of fascinating young people from all over the world had adventures like being taken to the Moulin Rouge by people he met in secret jazz clubs in the catacombs, or rescuing the women in the group from inopportune Frenchmen. Based on those stories, I took four years of French in high school and three in college, struggling through irregular verbs and dreaming of the day when I would go to Paris speaking French so well no one would know I wasn't a native.

Reality, of course, turned out to be quite different. No matter how well I may speak French (which is, for the record, not all that well), I don't have enough practice to be all that good at understanding. (I try to think out interactions in advance, and as soon as the other person says something I don't expect, I'm lost.) My first visit, in May 2005, was more stressful than anything else: there was too much to see in too short a time, and it was the first time I really had to face how thoroughly I do not speak French.

I've been back several times since then, and have now gotten to the point where I feel a bit of withdrawal if I go more than six months without a visit. (Yeah, yeah. I live in London. Trips to Paris are easier and cheaper than trips to DC used to be. Come to that, I've had trips to outer Brooklyn that took longer than the Eurostar.) I still find the city exhausting, and I'm still reminded of the inadequacy of my French each time I go, and I never do everything on the list of things I've decided to do with each trip. But I can't stay away.

Last week, I got to spend almost five days in Paris, following Gino on a business trip--and I think I finally got the hang of enjoying Paris.

For starters, I didn't have to be a tourist the whole time! I get sensory overload from too many sights seen. On my usual trips to Paris, I feel overwhelmed by how much I try to see, and disappointed by how much I miss.

This time, I didn't even try, half the trip. Monday and Tuesday I spent hanging out, drinking coffee and writing, with my grad school friend, the lovely and talented Coe Booth.

Fun new fact: even in Paris, the city of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Balzac and Zola, the best place to sit and write for hours and hours is still Starbucks. You can sit in the cafes with a notebook, or the papers, or an espresso and a blank look, but a laptop will totally kill the atmosphere.

So, Coe and I would meet for lunch at a cafe, then wander out into the streets of the Left Bank or Beaubourg, looking for that green-and-white sign. (You can't see it in this picture, but there's one hanging between us, in the window of this Starbucks near the Centre Pompidou.)

Step 2: Know your priorities. There's so much I haven't seen in Paris, but this trip I made a very limited list of what I wanted to tackle.

The last day I devoted to Stuff from the Guidebook: the Orangerie, the Musee Rodin, the Tuileries. Gino wasn't going to be done with his meetings until late, so at seven I talked the nice lady at Le Fumoir into giving me a table for the hour before she was going to need it for a dinner reservation, and had a Tom Collins and a plate of charcuterie before heading back to La Defense for supper with my husband in the hotel bar.

Step 3: Dress the part. My favorite part of the trip? On my way to Le Fumoir from the Musee Rodin, a man pulling a suitcase stopped me to ask directions (in French!). I was so tickled to be mistaken for "someone who would know where things are" in Paris that I felt really bad I couldn't help him! It was actually part of a theme of the week: usually French people switch to English as soon as we get past "bonjour", but this trip I often had to ask people to speak English. I'm convinced it was because, before the trip, I discovered a blog post (now sadly lost to the wilds of my browser history) about scarf-tying, and made it my mission to wear scarves in Paris. I planned whole outfits around the scarves I own, and for the first time ever, did not feel under-dressed on my visit.

And, the final step to de-stressing in Paris: I have learned to admit I don't speak French. Before getting into a complicated interaction, I apologize for my broken French. When I don't understand something, instead of pretending I do, I ask the person to switch to English or speak more slowly. It stops me feeling like either an impostor or a fish out of water, and no one ever minds.

It's taken six visits, but I think I have finally learned to appreciate Paris the way she deserves.